Summer
Reading Student Resources
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Middle School Chinook
Highland Odle Tillicum Tyee |
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6th
Grade Woodsong
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An autobiographical book that
provides a look at a man who thought, because he was a hunter and a trapper,
that he knew about the outdoors. Instead, he discovered he knew very little
until he opened himself to the realities of predators and prey, and to the
lessons taught to him by the animals he encountered and the sled dogs he
trained and raced. Some of the lessons are violent and painful, brought on by
the natural instincts of wild animals or Paulsen's own mistakes; others are
touching or humorous, and convey a sense of observation and awareness of the
various personality traits of the dogs he has raised and run. |
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7th
Grade Countdown
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When 14-year-old Elliot Schroeder is
selected by NASA to be the first Junior Astronaut, he has no way of knowing
the profound effect it will have on Vincent Ole Tome, a Maasai herder who is
also 14 years old. An unexpected event puts the boys in contact via
short-wave radio, and an African drought and an in-space emergency bring
about a climactic fact-to-face meeting. |
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8th
Grade The Ransom of Mercy Carter
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Deerfield, Massachusetts is one of the most remote, and
therefore dangerous, settlements in the English colonies. In 1704 an Indian
tribe attacks the town, and Mercy Carter becomes separated from the rest of
her family, some of whom do not survive. Mercy and hundreds of other settlers
are herded together and ordered by the Indians to start walking. The grueling
journey -- three hundred miles north to a Kahnawake Indian village in Canada
-- takes more than 40 days. At first Mercy's only hope is that the English
government in Boston will send ransom for her and the other white settlers.
But days turn into months and Mercy, who has become a Kahnawake daughter,
thinks less and less of ransom, of Deerfield, and even of her
"English" family. She slowly discovers that the "savages"
have traditions and family life that soon become her own, and Mercy begins to
wonder: If ransom comes, will she take it? |
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High School Bellevue Interlake Newport Sammamish |
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9th
Grade Of Mice and Men
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This is the story of a two lonely and alienated men who work as
farm laborers, drifting from job to job in California. Lennie is gentle
giant, physically strong but mentally retarded. George guides and protects
Lennie but also depends on him for companionship. Together, they have a dream
to someday buy a little farm where they can grow crops and raise rabbits and
live happily ever after. This, of course, is not to be as the title suggests.
"The best laid plans of mice and men" is a line in a poem by Robert
Burns, which describes how a field mouse's world is destroyed by a plow. |
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10th
Grade The House on
Mango Street
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Esperanza and her family didn't always live on Mango Street. Right off she says she can't remember all the houses they've lived in but "the house on Mango Street is ours and we don't have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there isn't a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. But even so, it's not the house we thought we'd get." Esperanza's childhood life in a Spanish-speaking area of Chicago is described in a series of spare, poignant, and powerful vignettes. Each story centers on a detail of her childhood: a greasy cold rice sandwich, a pregnant friend, a mean boy, how the clouds looked one time, something she heard a drunk say, her fear of nuns: "I always cry when nuns yell at me, even if they're not yelling." Esperanza's friends, family, and neighbors wander in and out of her stories; through them all Esperanza sees, learns, loves, and dreams of the house she will someday have, her own house, not on Mango Street. |
ESL Sophomore Composition & Literature Assignment INTERLAKE
GIFTED/IB LINK |
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11th
Grade Into the Wild by John Krakauer
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After graduating from
Emory University in Atlanta in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher
McCandless abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account
to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska, where he went to live in the wilderness.
Four months later, he turned up dead.
So why did Christopher McCandless trade a bright future--a college
education, material comfort, uncommon ability and charm--for death by
starvation in an abandoned bus in the woods of Alaska? This is the question
that Jon
Krakauer's book tries to answer. Not only about
McCandless's "Alaskan odyssey," but also the forces that drive
people to drop out of society and test themselves in other ways. |
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11th
Grade AP The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
and Their Eyes Were Watching God
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Self-made, self-invented millionaire
Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding
obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings.
Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of
cautionary tale about the American Dream. It's also a love story, of sorts,
the narrative of Gatsby's unrealistic passion for Daisy Buchanan. His
millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's
patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to
appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a
Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus
throughout. One of the most important works of twentieth-century American
literature, Zora Neale Hurston's beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were
Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty,
and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to
live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story
of fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through
three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. A true
literary wonder, Hurston's masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today
as when it was first published -- perhaps the most widely read and highly
regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature. |
Summer Reading Assignment for Their Eyes Were Watching God |
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12th
Grade & Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
*NOT AP English Literature and Composition |
"Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of
Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of
soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most
popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that
stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no
violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is
missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to
be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed
many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the
sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come. |
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Jane
Eyre
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If Jane was seen as something of a renegade in
nineteenth-century England, it is because her story is that of a woman who
struggles for self-definition and determination in a society that too often
denies her that right. But self-determination does not mean untrammeled
freedom for men or women. Rochester, that thorny masculine beast whom Jane
eventually falls for, is a man who sets his own laws and manipulates the
lives of those around him; before he can enter into a marriage of equals with
Jane he must undergo a spiritual transformation. Should the lesson sound dry,
it's not. Jane Eyre is full of drama: fires, storms, attempted murder, and a
mad wife conveniently stashed away in the attic. |
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International School |
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6th
Grade Woodsong
|
An autobiographical book that provides a look at a
man who thought, because he was a hunter and a trapper, that he knew about
the outdoors. Instead, he discovered he knew very little until he opened
himself to the realities of predators and prey, and to the lessons taught to
him by the animals he encountered and the sled dogs he trained and raced.
Some of the lessons are violent and painful, brought on by the natural
instincts of wild animals or Paulsen's own mistakes; others are touching or
humorous, and convey a sense of observation and awareness of the various
personality traits of the dogs he has raised and run. |
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7th/8th Grade The Goddess of
Yesterday
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The dramatic and bloody siege of Troy is one of the oldest and
best of human stories, and in Goddess of Yesterday Caroline Cooney
tells it afresh through the eyes of Anaxander, the daughter of the king of a
tiny Greek island. As a child she is taken as a hostage to the island of King
Nicander. When she is 13, marauding pirates sack the palace, killing everyone
but her. Anaxander frightens them off by pretending to be the goddess Medusa,
with the help of an octopus as a hairdo. When she is rescued by the ships of
King Menalaus, she assumes the identity of a princess, Nicander's daughter,
and becomes a royal guest. When Menalaus's cold and vain wife, Helen, runs
off to Troy with her lover, Paris, Anaxander goes along to protect Helen's
baby son. Within the walls of Troy, she is torn with conflicting loyalties as
the bronze-clad warriors of Menalaus land their ships on the plains below the
city and war is imminent. The characters of the Iliad come vividly alive in
this action-filled novel: the shallow and amoral Paris, the wailing
prophetess Cassandra in her tower prison, and especially Hector, a big,
straight-talking sweetheart. |
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9th/10th
Grade Notes from Underground By Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the
dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between
the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable
characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has
defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from
society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative
that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of
man’s essentially irrational nature. |
Please
Note- This text contains several other short stories that are not required summer reading. |
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11th
Grade The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
and
Their Eyes Were Watching God
|
Self-made, self-invented millionaire
Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding
obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings.
Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary
tale about the American Dream. It's also a love story, of sorts, the
narrative of Gatsby's unrealistic passion for Daisy Buchanan. His millions
made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician
East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When
she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama,
with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. One of the most important works of twentieth-century American
literature, Zora Neale Hurston's beloved 1937 classic, Their Eyes Were
Watching God, is an enduring Southern love story sparkling with wit, beauty,
and heartfelt wisdom. Told in the captivating voice of a woman who refuses to
live in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, it is the story
of fiercely independent Janie Crawford, and her evolving selfhood through
three marriages and a life marked by poverty, trials, and purpose. A true
literary wonder, Hurston's masterwork remains as relevant and affecting today
as when it was first published -- perhaps the most widely read and highly
regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature. |
Summer Reading Assignment for Their Eyes Were Watching God |
|
12th
Grade Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
|
"Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come. |
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PRISM |
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6th
Grade Countdown
|
When 14-year-old Elliot Schroeder is
selected by NASA to be the first Junior Astronaut, he has no way of knowing
the profound effect it will have on Vincent Ole Tome, a Maasai herder who is
also 14 years old. An unexpected event puts the boys in contact via
short-wave radio, and an African drought and an in-space emergency bring
about a climactic fact-to-face meeting. |
|
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6th,7th,8th
Grade The Kite RIder
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9th
Grade Goddess of Yesterday
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The dramatic and bloody siege of Troy is one of the oldest and
best of human stories, and in Goddess of Yesterday Caroline Cooney
tells it afresh through the eyes of Anaxander, the daughter of the king of a
tiny Greek island. As a child she is taken as a hostage to the island of King
Nicander. When she is 13, marauding pirates sack the palace, killing everyone
but her. Anaxander frightens them off by pretending to be the goddess Medusa,
with the help of an octopus as a hairdo. When she is rescued by the ships of
King Menalaus, she assumes the identity of a princess, Nicander's daughter,
and becomes a royal guest. When Menalaus's cold and vain wife, Helen, runs
off to Troy with her lover, Paris, Anaxander goes along to protect Helen's
baby son. Within the walls of Troy, she is torn with conflicting loyalties as
the bronze-clad warriors of Menalaus land their ships on the plains below the
city and war is imminent. The characters of the Iliad come vividly alive in
this action-filled novel: the shallow and amoral Paris, the wailing
prophetess Cassandra in her tower prison, and especially Hector, a big,
straight-talking sweetheart. |
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Gifted/IB- Interlake |
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Oedipus the King By Sophocles
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In the
world of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, everything happens on a grand
scale, from feats of heroism to the most terrible of mistakes. It is a world
of gods, prophets, kings, and plagues; a world of ancient tragedy whose
stories unfold with relentless majesty and high emotion. As the great
philosopher Aristotle explained in his Poetics (350 BC), the great
tragedies are plays capable of arousing pity and fear, and thereby of purging
those very emotions in us. Since at least Aristotle's time, Oedipus the
King has been praised as a model of the greatness of Greek tragedy. For
Aristotle the genius of the play resided in the organic perfection of its
structure, and Sophocles' characterization -- remarkably complex for his time
-- of Oedipus. |
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AP Language/IB HL 1 A Hero of Our Time By
Mikhail Lermontov
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Told from rotating viewpoints,
the novel relates the story of Pechorin, an effete Romantic hero who, despite
his audacious lifestyle, is bored with the world and with himself. Set in the
1830’s, Pechorin travels through the Caucasus mountains, riding horses,
hunting, evading death and dancing the mazurka with society women. |
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Gifted 11 & AP Literature/IB HL 2 Jane Eyre By
Charlotte Bronte
|
If Jane was seen as something of a renegade in
nineteenth-century England, it is because her story is that of a woman who
struggles for self-definition and determination in a society that too often
denies her that right. But self-determination does not mean untrammeled
freedom for men or women. Rochester, that thorny masculine beast whom Jane
eventually falls for, is a man who sets his own laws and manipulates the
lives of those around him; before he can enter into a marriage of equals with
Jane he must undergo a spiritual transformation. Should the lesson sound dry,
it's not. Jane Eyre is full of drama: fires, storms, attempted murder, and a
mad wife conveniently stashed away in the attic. |
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